“I May Be Wrong” Notes

Everything is connected: letting go of your thoughts and of control, turning inward and listening, being present, regularly resting in what’s peaceful, living in trust. All of it is about exploring the possibility of finding something that’s more real than our thoughts, more valuable than our thoughts.

#BePresent #Meditating

Conscious presence = Awareness –> The thoughts, the feelings, the physical sensations, everything is allowed to be exactly as it is.

This breathing, that’s all you have to do for the moment. You’re taking a break from everything else. Your frontal lobe has switched off. In this moment, you have no responsibilities. In this moment, there’s no plan to formulate, no opinion to give, nothing to remember. They only thing you need to do is breathe. Stay with it for as long as you feel like it.

I’m not here to encourage positive thinking. Absolutely not. Personally, I’m not convinced positive thinking is very powerful. What about trying not to think at all? Breathing or meditating without thinking at all is the way to ground you to the current moment, to the present.

When my sadness or anxiety or loneliness became overwhelming, I could choose to focus on my breathing, let my awareness rest in my body, and not unquestioningly believe all the thoughts my brain threw at me.

If you don’t unquestionably believe everything you think, if you’re completely mindful, if your attention is unfettered, you will discover a fundamental truth. That the universe operates according to this principle: You will know, what you need to know, when you need to know it. Timing.

There is nothing wrong with thinking about your own life. Your heavy bags, history and future. But there’s value in taking a break from it from time to time. Let it rest, let it sit. That usually makes it easier to pick the bags up again. Being present.

We learn in stillness, so we remember when the storm comes. During calmer periods I seized the opportunity to learn to let go of thoughts, practiced the ability to choose where I direct my attention, then I have an infallible ally. A partner who will stand by me in every situation, who is always on my side. That’s why people attend retreats and learn meditating. It would become your best trustworthy friend.

Anyone who has ever experienced true anxiety knows that if you believe your thoughts at those moments, things can turn dangerous. When depression and anxiety came, we meditate, we let go of dark thoughts, we turn attention from those horrible thoughts to our breathing.

The original form of us is the strongest, purest, unstoppable , most innocent self, it is there, just discover it access it.

#YourThoughts≠You

I have thoughts, I am not my thoughts.

We all have the ability to let go of our thoughts, to choose where we direct our attention, how long we allow our attention to linger on things that cause us harm.

Directing our attention, choosing what we aim it at, is the best and possibly the only thing we can do when things get really hard.

When you’re closed off emotionally (shutting down your emotions), playfulness, lightness, humor and spontaneity are all out of reach. You become mute and rigid. Insecurity (fears) ruins romance (relationship).

When faced with the insane, completely uncensured thoughts that bounce around in our heads, it’s easy to feel both astonished and horrified. It’s natural. There’s nothing weird about it. We just have to understand that these are thoughts – not truths. It is good to create a distance between you and your thoughts, chaos in our brains is totally fine, but don’t identify with them, don’t take it so seriously.

We can’t control our thoughts, we can only choose whether or not to believe it.

We believe in thoughts that want to harm us, thoughts that make it hard, heavy and complicated to be you and me. Psychological suffering is self-inflicted. It often contains a ‘should’ that hurts the most – I should be different. I should be wiser, more hardworking, richer, better, thinner, more mature. You can be stuck in that groove forever. Pain and suffering are caused by thoughts we cling to, ‘should’, things should be done in a certain way.

I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t feel ready to stop living. I didn’t want to become my diagnosis. It’s so easy to make yourself a victim in situations like these, or an identity. I wanted to remind the world, and maybe myself, I’m still here, still around. You are you, you are not your bad thoughts, you are not others’ opinions, you are not your weakness, you find the real you deep in your awareness, that’s the relaxed, mindful, unshaken you.

#LetGoOfControl #NotKnowing #Impermanence

We can get so far by just letting each other be who we are, by accepting each other. That way, we give each other a chance to move forward with all of our strengths, all of our talents, a chance to become more beautiful versions of ourselves. Let go of judging other people, let go of trying to make other people to be the way I think they would be.

Even if things didn’t turn out the way I though they would before I went, they turned out exactly the way they were meant to.

There is value in not getting stuck in a state of certainty. If you always cling to what you think you already know, you make yourself inaccessible, and you miss out on so much. If we want access to a higher wisdom, we have to let go of some of our convictions and become more comfortable with not knowing. Thinking we know is often a big problem. Knowing you don’t know is hardly ever a big problem. People who cling to what they think they already know are usually not present, are limited, are not listening, are not giving pleasure, are not fun to be around.

Listening without prejudice or judgement can help us understand ourselves. And that’s no small thing.

The only way to get rid of thoughts that are harming us, that are making us feel small, useless, lonely, afraid, sad, angry – is to let them go. It’s the thoughts we have real trouble letting go of that tend to harm us the most.

The farmer doesn’t believe it’s possible to know whether things that happen in life are good or bad. loosening our grip on those types of convictions is both liberating and a sign of wisdom. There’s a lot to be gained from remembering just how little we really know about the future, from objectively separating what we believe from what we know. We may believe in something but we don’t actually know it. We never know what will happen, what the future will look like, what the future will turn out to be.

Chaos may rattle you, but order can kill you.

I was imagining I knew what the world should look like. And when it didn’t conform to my ideas, I seized up. Thoughts with the word ‘should’ in them make me small, dull, and lonely. We can let go of things we cling to too hard: things, feelings, convictions. Clench your fist hard, then relax it into an open hand.

I hope you can live your life with slightly less firmly clenched fists and slightly more open hands. Slightly less control. Slightly more trust. Slightly less I need to know everything beforehand. Slightly more take life as it comes. It does all of us a world of good. Life doesn’t have be lived with constant anxiety about things not turning out the way we want. We don’t have to make ourselves smaller than we are. We have a choice. Do we want to grab life by the throat or do we want to embrace it? Less control, less ‘knowing’.

Impermanence. Nothing lasts, not even the difficult times.

The way I see it, genuine human, spiritual and transcendent growth isn’t so much about learning coping strategies; it’s more about putting down our baggage. About learning how to get stuck in our hang-ups a little bit less often and for shorter periods of time. Forget about not having hang-ups. Only the dead have no hang-ups. Hard times are not permanent, accept that hard times do exist, just watch it, live with it, let it pass through.

What helps us respond to life as it unfolds? often its less about planning, control and organization that you might think, and more about presence. To be in the flow. You’re alert and attentive. Aware if you like. You don’t dwell anxiously on the things that might go wrong, not constantly worried. Instead, you’re mindful to respond in an open manner. When facing uncertainty, letting go of control, letting go of knowing is very hard, we want to know, we want to take control, we want to turn the uncertainty to certainty. But when we cling to fixed convictions, when we are inflexible, we are actually fragile, we are relying on fragmented experience and emotions to make decisions rather than observing the here and now.

There is a difference between planning and thinking all your plans have to come to fruition. ‘Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.’

A big part of spiritual growth is about finding the courage to face uncertainty. When we learn to endure not knowing and not being in control, we gain access to a wiser part of ourselves. Be flexible, be present. We don’t get to control everything, we’re comfortable with not knowing.

Monastic life is designed to heighten the degree of uncertainty. And the results of that training are very useful. Trust. Life is about facing uncertainty, not about controlling or predictability. No one knows about the future, no one is sure about future things. We make plans, we do preparations, but at the end of the day, we can’t completely lean on those plans, we need to to trust the journey, we need to trust the ‘normal world’, not so hostile, cold, or so random. Trust and intelligence of the moment are the compasses.

We can condemn those acts. But we don’t have to close our hearts to the person who committed them. It is a mark of how far we’ve come when we have genuinely learned to separate people from their actions. What happens when you close. your heart to someone? That person may not be visibly harmed, but you are. It makes you a little bit smaller. You’re planting seeds of bitterness inside yourself. And if you choose to forgive, that can let that bitterness grow to the point where it does you real harm, without punishing the other person one bit. Why we forgive.

Forgiveness can be a key to freedom. Reconciling ourselves to what has happened isn’t mainly about being the bigger person. It’s about protecting our own mental wellbeing, about choosing which feelings to fill our minds with. About forgiveness.

Anger arises, but nothing does it occupy.

We still feel anger and other negativity from time to time, we stop identifying with them, we won’t be in that emotion for too long. They come and go, they no longer harm us, we are free.

#SelfValue #InwardListening

A job, what we spend our days doing, has to nourish and stimulate some deeper part of our being. That type of nourishment is rarely derived from success. Rather, it comes from feeling connected to the people you work with, feeling that your work has meaning, that your talents are somehow making a difference.

That which is peaceful inside us humans, that which is still and calm, that isn’t ruffled by thoughts that are always present in the background – that is valuable, that is worth taking not of. That has rewards. Only the stillness inside us gives us valuable and wise suggestions, and that’s why we meditate when we feel puzzled.

I’d been told that intellect trumps virtually everything. But here, I was given convincing proof of what I’d long suspected – that we humans have so many other resources at our disposal, too. There exist an intelligence that isn’t confined to our heads, and we would do well to turn to it more. That wise voice inside me, the one that had brought me all the way here, it’s worth listening to.

What was important: being present in everything you do. Telling the truth. Helping each other. And trusting silence more than chattering thoughts. It was like coming home.

It’s easy to get caught up in thinking happiness comes from external factors. That’s exactly what happened to me as a young adult and to this day I’m not immune to it. The gravitational pull of it is very strong. Appearing successful to others, by, for example, having an impressive career, can boost your ego for a while. But if you stop and think about it, you’ll soon realize it’s a bit like trying to live off nothing but sweets. Sweets are colorful, fun and delicious at the time. But they don’t provide lasting sustenance. Happiness comes from listening to the intelligence of the moment, or the voice of our wisdom. The wisdom is not as loud as our ego, so we need to pay attention.

I feel a lot more beautiful than I look. Through meditation, I’d become a more mindful person. And I’d worked to bring out in myself many of humanity’s most beautiful inherent characteristics: generosity, empathy, patience, compassion. I’d become more beautiful on the inside. Maybe appearance anxiety comes from that we know we have nothing else to offer. If we do, we’d recognize the inner beauty first and feel secured.

Divine virtues: loving-kindness, compassion, mudita or empathetic joy, equanimity, the beautiful resting places in the human heart, you always have to start with yourself. In order to grow in our love, we need to be able to direct our tenderness inwards. Give divine emotions to ourselves, so we can extend the love and empathy to others, to the world.

The reason I want to live with my back straight, guided by a moral compass, isn’t because some book somewhere says I should. It’s because I remember. Something beautiful starts to happen when we actively choose to take responsibility for what we say and do. it lightens the load. We do it not just for others, but mostly for ourselves. Only you would know who you are, what you do, how heavy your baggage is.